The Zeo Sleep Wheel: How Does My ZQ Compare?It’s not your imagination – your sleep really does change as you grow older! The Zeo Sleep Wheel helps you see how your ZQ and sleep phases compare with thousands of your peers.
Age Rising, ZQ Down? You’re Not Alone!
The Zeo Sleep Wheel, which represents the sleep patterns of thousands of people, shows how people of different ages sleep differently. Turn the wheel toward advancing age, and you can see that the average ZQ tends to go down. When you turn the wheel over, you can see how other sleep information changes over time.
The ZQ Side of the Sleep Wheel
The front of the Sleep Wheel shows the average ZQ among people of a certain age group, as well as that age group’s ZQ range. As you may know, ZQ is an objective measure of a single night of sleep, summarizing how you slept by combining information about your Total Z (total sleep time), Restorative sleep (Deep and REM), and Disrupted sleep (Time in Wake and Times Woken). Read more about ZQ here.
Sleep Details on the Back
The details on the back of the Sleep Wheel offer clues about how ZQ dips as age increases. As the age range rises on the Sleep Wheel, you’ll see that Total Z tends to diminish, as do times in Deep and REM sleep. Time in Wake (after having fallen asleep) is likely to increase with age. These changes lead to a drop in ZQ.
7 to 9 hours, No Matter Your Age
Next to the Total Z window on the back of the Sleep Wheel, you can see a very important message: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommends that all adults get 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night, regardless of age. You’ll notice that the numbers on the Sleep Wheel are not always the same as what the NIH recommends, because it shows how much people actually tend to get, as opposed to what they need.
As you might know from personal experience, we don’t always do what’s best for ourselves. This fact is evident on the Sleep Wheel, which shows that many of us often don’t sleep as many hours as we should for optimal sleep health.
Wide Variations in Sleep Numbers
Looking again at the back of the wheel, you will see from the windows below the average numbers that there is a wide variation in each of these sleep times. Let’s look, for example, at the back of the Sleep Wheel for people in their 50’s. You can see that Total Z averages 6.5 hours per night. The Total Z range, shown below, goes from about 5.5 to 7.5 hours each night. These differences are natural, and if your Total Z moves above or below the averages, you’re certainly not alone.
At Home Versus in a Lab
The numbers on the Zeo Sleep Wheel were collected by dozens of researchers, who examined thousands of sleep studies from around the world. The healthy volunteers who participated in these studies had to sleep in a laboratory setting with many sensors attached to their bodies. These volunteers slept as best they could but, as you can imagine, they might not have slept as soundly as they would have if they’d been in their own bedrooms. So, while these data shine a light on changes in sleep as we age, they do not necessarily represent the amount of sleep or sleep phases that you can get in the comfort of your own home. At the end of the day, scientists know little about how people actually sleep in their “natural habitat.” Using Zeo, you can measure your sleep in your own home.